“By that time it was seven o’clock and the janitor got an axe and broke out the lower panels with that, and I finally crawled out. Just as I did so three policemen came into the apartment and outside I could hear the fire gongs. Somebody looked out of the window and there was a hook and ladder company, which had come in answer to the telephone call of one of the guests, and were going to get me out by way of the bath-room window. The wedding, however, was over, the bride was in hysterics, and there was nothing left to do, since it was still raining hard, but to get another cab back to New York in the hope of getting to the station in time to enable sister to catch the 8.03 train for Westchester, the town she was visiting in, and where they were giving a card party in her honor that night. I was to go, too.
“We arrived at the station at exactly 8.04 P. M. The cab fare was five dollars. The next train she could get would be 9.30, and we hadn’t had a bite to eat since noon. There was nothing to do but have some dinner, which I was in no mood for. We went to one of the hotels near by and ate a little something. When the waiter brought the bill, it was nine dollars and eighty cents, and I never paid over fifty cents for a good dinner in my life. I had paid out eighteen dollars in cash for three different cab rides—one of ten minutes, three dollars; one of five minutes, ten dollars; and one of an hour, five dollars. Fifteen dollars of this was sister’s money. The dinner cost me nine dollars and eighty cents, which made twelve dollars and eighty cents of my own money I had spent on a wedding which I didn’t see, and on a trip to New York on which I saw nothing but a lot of thieving cabbies.
“By that time I was so angry I was red in the face, and the madder I got the more sister laughed, until I got out of patience with her and put her on the train, while I took the sleeper for Lowell, and I have been mad at things in general ever since, until now I begin to think it was laughable myself, after it is all over, though it cost a lot of money, and I didn’t see much of the big city.”
While Hans was telling this Hal sat in his chair and roared and laughed until he couldn’t laugh any more. It must have been awfully funny with Hans telling it in his own peculiar way. Hal said finally he thought Hans had had a pretty good time riding around in cabs all day just like a real New Yorker, but Hans said he had enough of riding in cabs, and he didn’t like weddings anyhow.
After a little while, Hal finished his letter and went into his own room. Then he sat down to write the story of Hans’ experience in New York to his folks. He started in with a new sheet of paper and just for fun he wrote it out like a story, heading and all. The heading was like this:
Going to a Wedding in Brooklyn from New York, U. S. A.
By Harold Case
Then he wrote out the story very much as Hans had told it to him, adding a touch here and there as the funny side of it occurred to him again, and when he had finished it he started to put it in the letter which he had written to his folks at home. What he really did, however, was to make a mistake through pure carelessness which, had he only known it, was to cause him not only a lot of joy but a great deal of happiness.
He had addressed a letter to the editor of the Out Door Weekly in New York for terms to agents soliciting subscriptions to the magazine, as Hans and he had talked about before Hans’ trip to New York. The scheme was for Hans and himself to try to get orders for the magazine by the year from the people who lived in near-by towns, and the letter had to be written, now that Hans had come back from New York without seeing the people. Now when he came to put the story about Hans, intended only for his folks, in the letter he had written them, he picked up the wrong envelope and stuck the story in the envelope addressed to the editor of the Out Door Weekly, and the letter he intended for the editor he put in the envelope addressed to his folks along with his regular letter. Then he mailed them and went to bed.
About a week later, among the letters received by Hal was one from the Out Door Weekly, and Hal opened it to see what they had to say about the job of getting subscriptions which they had asked for. When he opened the letter something dropped out of it to the floor, and upon picking it up found it was a check for $250, made out to Harold Case. Of course, he didn’t understand this so he opened the letter, and this is what he read: