"As assistant bookkeeper in a grocery store!" he answers. "Now you have it!"
"But you said your father was a big man in Wall Street!" I busts out.
"He is!" answers Harold, lookin' over at the Santa Fe. "They don't come any bigger. He's a traffic policeman at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street and stands six foot four in his socks!"
"Sweet Cookie!" shouts the Kid, and falls off the rock.
When we recover from that, Harold has smoked the other cigarette, and he nods for my box. Then he asks us do we want to hear the rest.
"If you don't tell it," says the Kid, "you'll never leave here alive! Hurry up, I'm dyin' to hear it!"
"Well," says the ex-J. Harold Cuthbert, "I am about to be married and at the eleventh hour Nemesis has gripped me. I told my fiancée that I was being featured in 'The End of the World' and that it would be exceedingly easy for me to get her a part in the picture—she having expressed a desire to that effect at various times. She will be here within the hour to watch me being filmed and to hold me to my promise to place her as leading woman opposite me." He stops and moans. "Gentlemen," he goes on, "picture for yourself the contretemps when she finds I am nothing but a super and that Genaro wouldn't give Sarah Bernhardt a job on a recommendation from me! My romance will be shattered, and the—the humiliation will kill me!"
There was a heavy silence for a minute, and then the Kid whistles.
"Well, pal," he says, "you have certainly balled things up a few, haven't you?"
Joe Trout just let loose another moan.