Shorty McCabe on the Job

Do things just happen, like peculiar changes in the weather, or is there a general scheme on file somewhere? Is it a free-for-all we're mixed up in--with our Harry Thaws and our...

Say, take it from me, this job of umpirin' a little-deeds-of-kindness campaign, as conducted by J. Bayard Steele, Esq., ain't any careless gladsome romp through the daisy fields...

Who started that dope about Heaven givin' us our relations but thanks be we can pick friends to suit ourselves? Anyway, it's phony. Strikes me we often have friends wished on us...

Sadie flickers a grin. "It seems Robin came two days ago, and has hardly been seen about the house since. Besides, Purdy-Pell could do nothing with him when he was here before,...

You know how free this J. Bayard Steele has been in callin' on me for help in puttin' over his little deeds of kindness, at so much per deed? Well, here the other day he shows u...

Kind of odd the way the Morans and Elisha Porter Bayne coincided. You'd think so if you could see 'em bunched once; for Elisha P. is a mighty fine man; you know, one of our most...

But he waves aside my comedy stab and proceeds, chesty and serious, "Really, I am, though. It's this philanthropic executor work that I've been dragged into doing by that whimsi...

I'd heard the front office door pushed open and listened to a couple of heavy steps on the floor runner before I glances round to find this high party with the wide, stooped sho...

"I can't help it," says she. "Twenty years! No holidays, no home, no relatives: nothing but sew and mend, sew and mend--and for strangers, at that! Talk about dull gray lives--u...

"Yes," says J. Bayard Steele, adjustin' the chin part in his whiskers and tiltin' back comf'table in his chair, "I am beginning to think that the late Pyramid Gordon must have b...

If you must know, I was doin' a social duck. Not that I ain't more or less parlor broke by this time, or am apt to shy at a dinner coat, like a selfmade Tammany statesman when a...

"And believe me, Shorty," goes on Mr. Hunk Burley, tappin' a stubby forefinger on my knee, and waggin' his choppin'-block head energetic, "when I get behind a proposition yuh go...

Might have been a wrong hunch, as it turned out; but for awhile there what I wanted to do most was to take this Eggleston K. Ham, wad him up in a neat little lump, and stuff him...

"It seemed so absurdly simple at first too," says J. Bayard Steele, tappin' one of his pearl-gray spats with his walkin' stick. "But now--well, the more I see of this Gerald Web...

It was mostly my fault. I'd left the Physical Culture Studio and was swingin' east across 42d-st. absentminded, when I takes a sudden notion to have lunch at my favorite chophou...

I'd strolled into the front office in my shirt sleeves, and was leanin' against the gym door listenin' to Pinckney and his friend slangin' each other--and, believe me, it's a wo...

First place, Swifty Joe should have let the subject drop. Anyway, he needn't have come paradin' into the front office in his gym suit to show me his nutty theory of how Young Di...

"Now that you mention it, I expect she is," says I, playin' safe and foxy. It's a useful phrase to pull in such cases; but here was once when I must have worked it overtime. Sad...

I can't say just how I got roped in; whether it was me that discovered Alvin, or him who took to me. Must have been some my fault; for here was a whole subway car full of people...