nd
annual ball of the Truck Drivers' Association, or just one of them
Anarchist talkfests in the back room of some beer parlor. There's no
telling. We may drink muddy coffee out of dinky brass cups with a lot of
Syrian rug sellers down on Washington Street, or drop into the middle of
a gang of sailors down on Front Street.

And I'm no bodyguard, mind. The Boss ain't in much need of that. But he
likes to have some one to talk to, and I guess most of his friends don't
go in for such promiscuous visitin' lists as he does. I like it well
enough, but where _he_ gets any fun out of it I can't see. I put it up
to him once, and what do you suppose he says? Asks me if I ever heard of
a duck by the name of Panzy de Lean.

"Sounds kind of familiar," says I. "Don't he run a hotel or something
down to Palm Beach?"

"You're warm," says the Boss, "but you've mixed your dates. Old Panzy
struck the east coast about four hundred years before our friend Flagler
annexed it. And he wasn't in the hotel business. Exploring was his line.
He was looking for a new kind of mineral water that he was going to call
the Elixir of Life. Well, in some ways Panzy and I are alike."

It was a josh, all right, that he was handin' out, but he meant
somethin' by it, for the Boss ain't the kind to talk just for the sake
of making a noise. I never let on but what I was next. Later in the
season I had a chance to come back at him with it, for along in February
we got under way for Palm Beach ourselves.

"Goin' to take a hack at the 'lixir business?" I says.

"No, Shorty," says he. "Just going to dodge a few blizzards and watch
the mob."

But he didn't like it much, being in that push, so we took a jump over
to Bermuda, where everything's so white it makes your eyes ache. That
didn't suit him, either.

"Shorty," says he one day, "you didn't sign for any outside tour, but
I've got the go fever bad. Can you stand it for awhile in foreign
parts?"

"I'm game," says I, not knowing what I was to be up against.

So we hiked back to New York and Mister 'Ankins--he's the lady-like gent
that stays home an' keeps our trousers creased, an' juggles the laundry
bag and so forth, when we're there--Mr. 'Ankins he packs a couple of
steamer trunks and off we starts.

Well, we hit a lot of outlandish places, like Paris and Berlin; and
finally, when things began to warm up some, and I knew by the calendar
that the hokey-pokey men had come out on the Bowery, we lands i