Now you may laugh just as much as you please, but I knowed right away as soon as I took the hat into my hands that I’d found what I was looking for.
“This is a new one,” I says to the president, who stood right behind me.
“Maybe. I don’t know nothing at all about it,” he says.
“But it is,” says I. “It ain’t never been worn at all. Did it come to the bank from the maker, or did he bring it?”
“You’ll have to ask Camm; I’ll never tell you,” he says.
Well, now I’d just like to have had the chance to ask Camm, you bet.
But there wasn’t any show then, so I asked the man whose name was in the hat. It was Silverstein in the Bowery, a little dried-up Jew.
Now I expected nothing but to get fired out as soon as ever I went into the store, so I just tried a little dodge.
I went in with a rush.
“Say!” I says. “Mr. Brady wants to know who you sold this hat to?”