The Cafe Maginnis rang to the note of victory.  The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass.  From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds.  The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan’s hand.  And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz an audacious, thrilling impulse.

He stepped forward into the little cleared space in which majesty moved, and held out his hand.

Billy McMahan grasped it unhesitatingly, shook it and smiled.

Made mad now by the gods who were about to destroy him, Ikey threw away his scabbard and charged upon Olympus.

“Have a drink with me, Billy,” he said familiarly, “you and your friends?”

“Don’t mind if I do, old man,” said the great leader, “just to keep the ball rolling.”

The last spark of Ikey’s reason fled.

“Wine,” he called to the bartender, waving a trembling hand.

The corks of three bottles were drawn; the champagne bubbled in the long row of glasses set upon the bar.  Billy McMahan took his and nodded, with his beaming smile, at Ikey.  The lieutenants and satellites took theirs and growled “Here’s to you.”  Ikey took his nectar in delirium.  All drank.

Ikey threw his week’s wages in a crumpled roll upon the bar.

“C’rect,” said the bartender, smoothing the twelve one-dollar notes.  The crowd surged around Billy McMahan again.  Some one was telling how Brannigan fixed ’em over in the Eleventh.  Ikey leaned against the bar a while, and then went out.

He went down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived.  And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages.  And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality.

But even as they plucked at him and struck him Ikey remained in his ecstatic trance of joy.  His head was in the clouds; the star was drawing his wagon.  Compared with what he had achieved the loss of wages and the bray of women’s tongues were slight affairs.

He had shaken the hand of Billy McMahan.

* * * * * * *

Billy McMahan had a wife, and upon her visiting cards was engraved the name “Mrs. William Darragh McMahan.”  And there was a certain vexation attendant upon these cards; for, small as they were, there were houses in which they could not be inserted.  Billy McMahan was a dictator in politics, a four-walled tower in business, a mogul, dreaded, loved and obeyed among his own people.  He was growing rich; the daily papers had a dozen men on his trail to chronicle his every word of wisdom; he had been honored in caricature holding the Tiger cringing in leash.

But the heart of Billy was sometimes sore within him.  There was a race of men from which he stood apart but that he viewed with the eye of Moses looking over into the promised land.  He, too, had ideals, even as had Ikey Snigglefritz; and sometimes, hopeless of attaining them, his own solid success was as dust and ashes in his mouth.  And Mrs. William Darragh McMahan wore a look of discontent upon her plump but pretty face, and the very rustle of her silks seemed a sigh.