"From Bennett?" says he. "Oh, he is right, I suppose. He knows how useless I am. But we cannot all succeed, can we? Some of us must stay at the bottom and prop the ladder."
One thing about Uncle Dudley, he had no whine comin'. He takes it all meek and cheerful, and so far as I could make out he's most as useful around the office as a lot of others that gets chesty whenever they think what would happen to the concern if they should be sick for a week. Anyway, there's frequent calls for old Dudley to straighten out this or that; but somehow he never seems to get credit for bein' much more than a sort of a walkin' copybook that remembers what other people don't want to lumber up their valuable brains with. Maybe it's the white mud guards, or his habit of lettin' anyone boss him around, that keeps him down.
And I expect things would have gone on that way, until he either dropped out or got the blue envelope some payday, if it hadn't been for this lid liftin' business up at Albany. Course, you've read how they uncovered first one lot of grafters and then another, and fin'lly, with that last swipe of the muck rake, got the Corrugated rung into the mess? And, say, anyone would think, from some of the papers, that we was all a bunch of crooks down here, spendin' our time feedin' wads of hundred-dollar bills to the yellow dog. Maybe it don't stir up Mr. Robert some thorough, though!
"Why," I heard him say to the old man, "it's a beastly outrage, that's what it is! All the fellows at the club are chaffing me about it, you know. And besides it's disturbing business frightfully. Look at the tumble our shares took yesterday! I say, Governor, we must send out a denial."
"Huh!" growls Old Hickory. "Who cares a blinkety blanked blank what they say we did? Let 'em prove it!"
Then the next day them checks was sprung on the investigatin' committee, and it looked as though they'd made out their case against the Corrugated. Perhaps there wa'n't doin's on the seventeenth floor that mornin'! Clear out where I sat I could hear the boss callin' for first one man and then another, and Piddie is turkeyin' in and out so excited he don't know whether he's on duty or runnin' bases. Once, when he stops to lean against the spring-water bottle and wipe his dewy brow, I slips up behind and taps him quick on the shoulder.
"Ye-e-e-es, sir!" says he, before he sees who it is.
"Never mind, Piddie," says I. "I was goin' to ask you 'Guilty or not guilty?' But what's the use? Anyone can see it was you that did it."
"You—you impudent young sauce box!" he begins. "How dare you——"
"Ah, save that for the subpœna server," says I. "He'll be in here after you in a minute. And, say, my guess is that you'll get about ten years on the rockpile."