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“S’all right,” gasped Michael, “s’all right, Charley. You can have the money. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Why—why, you’re one of my oldest friends.”

Charley shook his head.

“I don’t understand,” he said brokenly. “Where did you come from—how did you get here?”

“I’ve been following you. I was just behind.”

“I’ve been here for half an hour.”

“Well, it’s good you chose this pole to—to wait under. I’ve been looking at it from down by the bridge. I picked it out on account of the crossbar.”

Charley had risen unsteadily to his feet and now he walked a few steps and looked up the pole in the full moonlight.

“What did you say?” he asked after a minute, in a puzzled voice. “Did you say this pole had a crossbar?”

“Why, yes. I was looking at it a long time. That’s how—”

Charley looked up again and hesitated curiously before he spoke.

“There isn’t any crossbar,” he said.

— ◆ —

(The Saturday Evening Post, 10 October 1925)

The Ritz Grill in Paris is one of those places where things happen—like the first bench as you enter Central Park South, or Morris Gest’s office, or Herrin, Illinois. I have seen marriages broken up there at an ill-considered word and blows struck between a professional dancer and a British baron, and I know personally of at least two murders that would have been committed on the spot but for the fact that it was July and there was no room. Even murders require a certain amount of space, and in July the Ritz Grill has no room at all.