XXI
AN ANCIENT PROBLEM
"An twent' from Rosie Légère's," said Angel, "maka two hundre'."
Hermann Hoffmann, alone behind the bar in Schleger's saloon, and half asleep as he bent over a thumbed and stained copy of the last evening's paper, scarcely raised his head. It was half-past one o'clock in the morning. Except for Angelelli and the man to whom he was talking at a table by the door, the place was empty of customers, and so unconcerned were these two late-comers that, had he wished it, every word of their conversation could have been taken down by the bar-keeper.
But the bar-keeper did not wish it. He knew both the men, and had heard something of the character of each, as every good bar-keeper comes to know and to hear about most of the regular patrons of the establishment that employs him. With Angel he had even had a nodding acquaintance in the days of the brewery-wagon, and since he had donned the white jacket he had seen often the narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, slouching Austrian now in conference with the dapper Rafael. He had been told that this Austrian, with his bristling brown hair, pale face, and thin mouth, pulled downward at one corner by an ugly scar, made his regular living by appropriating the wages of a girl that he nightly drove forth to scour the dark streets, earning what money she could from what looks were left her and stealing what she could not earn. And Hermann knew that, now an election was near, both of these proud possessors of the suffrage were doing their exacted duty for the powers that permitted them to thrive, and were, like the army of others in their own profession, through all New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, through the tenderloin of every American city, providing for the voting of repeaters, of dead men, of men that never were, in the interests of whichever of the two great political parties happens to be in control of the city where such votes are needed.
"Mirka," said Angel, laying down his gold-rimmed fountain-pen and looking up from the back of the envelope on which he had been making his calculations, "we weell need a hundre' more."
Mirka, the Austrian, tried to smile, but that ugly scar at the corner of his mouth caught the smile in the making and pulled it down into a sinister sneer.
"I can smoke out fifty if you can," he said.
"Da sama kind?"
"Yes."