Big Patsy shuddered, turned ashen, and wished to Hell that he had dressed in his best: how they would guffaw at Charles Street Station, at such time they saw him in this antic motley.

But Cozenage merely smiled with gloomy unction. “Bawdy-Lair,” he murmured. “‘FLOR DEE MOLL.’ Now then!” (Big Patsy, The Kerry Pig, Wallace, and Red Fred, swallowed, convinced that the agent de police was merely playing cat-and-mouse with them.) “Did you people encounter any suspicious characters on your trip?”

Silence.

“Nobody tried to entice you into any little games of three-card monte in the passenger saloon of a sidewheel steamer?” Captain Cozenage inquired, hopefully.

Four heads were dumbly shaken from side to side. The Captain’s face fell. He had, some three months earlier, interrupted a bocca tournament on a shad-barge moored off South Street; but since then, nothing.

Patrolman Ottolenghi now for the first time made himself heard. “‘And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day,’” he groaned, “‘saith the Lord: there shall be many dead bodies in every place, they shall cast them forth in silence.’ Brethren—” he began. The Kerry Pig slowly and mesmerically crossed himself.

“Well, Captain,” Red Fred ventured timorously, “I’ve got to be getting these folks around. Heh. Heh.”

Ottolenghi, rolling his vacuous blue eyes in terrible righteousness, flailed wildly in the direction of the Caricature espresso house, intoning sonorously, “‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven…’” and seemed intent to expound in uninvited and morbid detail on this theme when Big Patsy, endeavoring at one and the same time to Method-act his role and allay the officer’s fervor, added sotto voce:

“I’m hip! Wail, baby!”

At which comment Cozenage’s eyebrows, like a pair of startled caterpillars, squirmed upwards. “Oh, pansies, eh? Queers, huh! We got enough a them preverts walking the streets down here without you fags from outta town coming in to start trouble, pinchin’ sailors on shore leave, and like that.”