“But Mr. Slocum,” protested Jacobson, “you couldn’t do that. Still I am all tied up with them goods und I must have more time.”
“I’m sorry for you if you’re going to be embarrassed,” said Mr. Slocum, “but I can’t help myself. The state bank examiner was in here yesterday going over our books and he tells me we must clean up a lot of our accounts. Now, your note for a hundred thousand dollars is a demand note, as you will recall, and not a time note, so I must ask you to be able to take up that note not later than Wednesday, the fifteenth of next month.”
“Vell,” said Mr. Jacobson resignedly, “that’s the vay things go. Vot has to be has to be, I guess.” He thought for a moment.
“Mr. Slocum,” he said, “maybe you have yourself looked into the ins and out of underwear, eh?”
“Mr. Jacobson,” said the banker, “I’m not interested in the underwear business.”
“Vell,” said Mr. Jacobson softly, “you should be. Because Venesday, the fifteenth, you’re going to be in it.”
§ 114 Me Lady’s One Weak Point
Martin Green, one of the best-known newspaper men in New York, has remarkable memory for faces. Twenty odd years ago he was a reporter in St. Louis. At a summer park he became acquainted with a vaudeville team consisting of a brawny Irishman and the Irishman’s equally brawny Swedish wife. The team had an act which was simple, and yet thrilling. Their stage props consisted of a sledge-hammer and a collection of paving-stones. The pair would come forth from the wings, and the lady would station herself in the centre of the stage and upon her head the gentleman would balance a large, jagged lump of limestone. Then, stepping back, he would swing his sledge-hammer aloft and bring it down with all the force of his mighty arms upon the stone, dashing it into scores of fragments. The lady would blink slightly, take her bow and the couple would back from sight to reappear an hour or so later and repeat the performance.
Two decades passed. In 1920 Green was reporting the National Republican Convention at Chicago. One evening he boarded a trolley car. The car was crowded and Green found standing room on the rear platform. Something about the face of the conductor stirred a memory long buried in his brain. He studied the countenance of the other for a minute and then the answer came to him.
“Say, look here,” he asked. “Aren’t you Brennan of the old team of Brennan and Swenson that used to do a turn at the summer park in St. Louis way back about 1900?”