But before they went they carefully cached in the window-box the cabbage he had cooked for dinner.
With a slow luxurious joy in every movement he put on the overcoat. Even in the pocket in which he stuck the seven Christmas dollars he had a distinct pleasure, for his undercoat pockets were too torn, too holey, to carry anything in them. They went prancing to the Hungarian restaurant. They laughed so much that Father forgot to probe her about the overcoat, and did not learn that she had bought it second-hand, for three dollars, and had saved the three dollars by omitting lunch for nearly four weeks.
They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at the next table--a man who made jokes. Something about the "Yiddisher gavotte," and saying, "We been going to dances a lot, but last night the wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for Grant's Tomb!" It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn't make many jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people. Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and they rose from the table.
Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rack behind them. He gasped, "Why, where--Why, I hung it----"
He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he whispered to Mother, "My overcoat is gone--it's been stolen--my new overcoat. Now I can't go out and get a job--"
They cried out, and demanded restitution of the waiter, the head-waiter, the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask heavy questions in bad English and ejaculate, "Somebody stole it from right behind you there when you weren't looking."
One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, "He ought to watched it."