"Stout, Rex - The Rope Dance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stout Rex)

"I see," said Rick. "Much obliged."

And with a farewell nod he turned again and disappeared into the street.

It was noon when he awoke the next day in his room at the hotel. He first felt a vague sense of
depression, then suddenly everything came back to him. He jumped out of bed, filled the
washbowl with cold water and ducked his head in it, then washed and dressed. That done, he
descended to the dining room and ate six eggs and two square feet of ham. After he had paid the
breakfast check he went into the lobby and sank into a big leather chair.

"Let's see," he said to himself, "that leaves me fourteen dollars and twenty cents. Thank heaven
Henderson didn't look in my vest pocket, though he did take my watch out of the other one. That
watch would have got me back to Honeville. The fare is fifty-eight dollars. I'll starve before I'll
telegraph Fraser. Well, let's see."

He spent the entire afternoon loitering about the hotel, trying to get his mind to work. How to
make some money? The thing appeared impossible. They don't hold roping contests in New
York. He considered everything from sweeping streets to chauffeuring. Could he drive a car
around New York? No money in it, anyway, probably. But surely a man could do something.

THE ROPE DANCE

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8

By evening he had decided on nothing. After dinner he strolled up Broadway and bought a ticket
for the revue. He was determined to find it amusing, for Mr. Henderson had said it was a bum
show. It really bored him to death. But he stayed till the final curtain. Then he found himself on
Broadway again.

Just how he got into Dickson's is uncertain. He wanted a drink, and he wandered into the place
and found himself in the presence of "the most famous cabaret in America." Rick sat at a small
table at one end of the immense, gorgeous room, watching the antics of the dancers and singers
and other performers on the platform, and it was there that his idea came to him. Before he went
to bed that night he had decided to give it a trial the very next day.

Accordingly the following morning he sought out a hardware store on Sixth Avenue and
purchased thirty yards of first grade hemp rope and a gallon of crude oil. The cost was eight
dollars and sixty cents. These articles he took back to the hotel, and for three hours he sat in his
room rubbing the oil into the rope to bring it to the required degree of pliancy and toughness.

Then he spliced a loop in one end, doubled it through and made a six-foot noose--the size af the
room would not permit a larger one-- and began whirling it about his head. A sigh of satisfaction
escaped him. Ah, the nimble wrist! And the rope would really do very well; a little limbering up
and he would ask nothing better.

He pulled his traveling bag from under the bed, dumped out its contents and put the rope,
carefully coiled, in their place. Then, with the bag in his hand, he descended to the street and
made his way uptown to Dickson's. At the entrance he halted a moment, then went boldly inside