Believe you me, never have I been handed a meaner deal than that, no, not even the night Goldringer first heard of me and came to see my try-out for the big time and my pink tights didn't come.
"Ma!" says I. "Why don't you call him up and find out why didn't he?"
"I've done that!" she says. "And he claims on his oath it was sent with the rest. I spoke to the boy which brought it and then to Schultz himself. They both claim they give it to Rudie."
Rudie was the janitor but he had missed his profession. He had ought to of been a sleight-of-hand man, for he could make things disappear in a way which would of delighted a morning matinée audience, especially those under twelve years of age. Believe you me, though, he was never known to make anything grow where nothing had been before—not rabbits or even silk handkerchiefs, but it's the truth that he had onct or twice caused a vanished quart of cream to reappear if given a sufficiently hard call quick enough after it was missed. And the minute I heard he was cast for a part in my tragedy, I decided to hear him read his lines right off without no delay, because it was practically impossible that he could of got away with more than a quart yet and I was prepared to go through the business of believing him when he come to the description of how he had dropped it by accident and too bad but it broke.
Which was all right in theory, but Rudie did nothing of the kind. Evidently so long as he was lying he had made up his mind it was as well to be killed for a case as a quart, as the poet says, and when I sent for him and he had kept me waiting while he sifted the ashes and pounded on the steam pipes and talked to the garbage man and got a light from the cop and chatted with the elevator-girl and a few little odds and ends like that just to show me where I got off, he finally decided to come up. Well, it was seven months to Xmas, so what could I expect? Anyways, he finally made his entrance, down R. C. to footlights, in my Louis-size drawing-room, leaving tracks behind him which Ma spotted with a angry eye as fast as he laid them, and with all the well-known courtesy of the proletariat he looked me in the eye.
"Well?" he says.
"Say, Trotsky!" I says, for I had never liked this bird, as he was on one continued drunk. "Look here, Lenine," I says, glad of the chance to insult him. "A case of fine whisky at sixty dollars net seems to of been avoidably detained in your dug-out. I expect that with a little searching you can stumble on it. And as for that bottle you broke by accident, don't bother to mention it," I says, "because I am gladly doing so for you," I says. "Only kindly find the rest and we will also forget about this morning's cream."
Probably I hadn't ought to of been so generous, for Rudie sort of swayed a little and give me a pleasant childlike smile out of his unshaved doormat of a face.
"Dunno wash you mean!" he says, real pleasant.
"Jim is right about the kick in that stuff," I says, eyeing him critically. "You certainly have a swell bun!"