"Well, go and see if he isn't through with it," Smith directed. "I haven't seen the losses yet this morning."
Almost immediately, a modern Manhattan Mercury, Jimmy was again at his side.
"No, sir—he says he's still usin' it," he reported.
"Bring it to me when he's finished," Smith closed the matter, devoting himself to other things. Those requiring his attention were numerous enough, but first of all came an interruption in the shape of a caller.
All manner of men come into the agency department of an insurance company. Smith's field covered the whole Atlantic Coast and Gulf sections of the country, and the agents from these states alone made quite an army, and any one of these agents was likely at any time to appear from a bland blue sky, completely upsetting the General Agent's continuity of work. Then there were the placers from the brokerage firms, offering out-of-town risks which most of them had personally never seen and knew little or nothing about, and whose descriptive powers were all the greater for being unhampered by any blunt facts, a few of which are so often fatal to a successful rhetorical ascension. Then there were the various clients of the company who came straggling in to have a New York City policy transferred to cover for six days at Old Point Comfort, or to ask whether the presence of a Japanese heater—size two by three and one half inches—would destroy the validity of their policy; and there was the lady whose false teeth fell into the kitchen stove while she was putting on a scuttle of coal, and who thought the company should reimburse her for the loss under her policy which covered all her personal effects and wearing apparel; and then there was the suspicious individual who called to make sure that his premium had been properly transmitted to the company, for the local agent in his town has strange ways and looked very peculiar when accepting the money.
These and a hundred others, all in the way of business; and in addition there were the shifting atoms of humanity who float in and out of the office buildings of a great city, pensioners for the most part on either the bounty or the carelessness of busy men—waifs in the industrial orbit who gain their living by various established or ingenious variations of the more indirect forms of brigandage. There were men selling books that probably no one in the world would ever wish to buy or to read; women soliciting funds for charitable institutions which might or might not exist; salesmen positively enthusiastic in their desire to give the Guardian the benefit of their patent pencil sharpeners, or gas crowns, or asbestos window shades, or loose-leaf ledgers, or roach powder of peculiar pungency and efficiency. Of course the elevator attendants were supposed to distinguish between the sheep and the goats, and to let only legitimate callers ascend, but the discretionary power of the Ethiopian is scarcely subtle—or at least such was the case with the Guardian's staff of watchdogs—and as a result many a visitor reached the floor where Smith presided only to have his disguise fall from him at his first word and to be politely ejected by the invaluable Jimmy, who was accustomed to accompany the gentle strangers as far as the street door in order that there might be no misapprehension on their part.
This particular morning Smith disposed with more or less ease of several claimants to his attention, before he was finally brought to a pause by the appearance of Mr. Darius Howell of Schuyler, Maine, who had come to New York in connection with his potato business, and who had incidentally decided to call at the office of the Guardian which he also had the honor locally to represent. Years before, Smith had once visited Schuyler, and at that time had met the small, grizzled individual who now stood before him. He had not, however, the slightest idea of the identity of his visitor, and waited a brief moment for a clew to aid him.
"You don't remember me, I reckon," said the caller. "I remember you, though, Mr. Smith. My name is Darius—"
"Howell," said Smith, instantly, getting up to shake hands. Of all the agents reporting to him there was only one Darius. "I remember you very well. I hope you haven't come to tell me that Schuyler has burned up. Come in and sit down. It must be five years since I've seen you."
"Six years come next July," agreed the other, cautiously. It would have been impossible for him to admit the simplest proposition without some sort of qualification; he never had done so, and there seemed no valid reason to suppose that he ever would.