He paused to emphasize the irony.

“No, Abe,” he concluded, “don’t you worry about them samples, nor them fixtures, neither.  You got worry enough if you tend to your own business, Abe.  I’ll see that them samples gets up to Nineteenth Street in good shape.”

Abe shrugged his shoulders and made for the door.

“And them fixtures also, Abe,” Morris shouted after him.

The loft building on Nineteenth Street into which Potash & Perlmutter proposed to move was an imposing fifteen-story structure.  Burnished metal signs of its occupants flanked its wide doorway, and the entrance hall gleamed with gold leaf and plaster porphyry, while the uniform of each elevator attendant would have graced the high admiral of a South American Navy.

So impressed was Abe with the magnificence of his surroundings that he forgot to call his floor when he entered one of the elevators, and instead of alighting at the fifth story he was carried up to the sixth floor before the car stopped.

Seven or eight men stepped out with him and passed through the door of H. Rifkin’s loft, while Abe sought the stairs leading to the floor below.  He walked to the westerly end of the hall, only to find that the staircase was at the extreme easterly end, and as he retraced his footsteps a young man whom he recognized as a clerk in the office of Henry D. Feldman, the prominent cloak and suit attorney, was pasting a large sheet of paper on H. Rifkin’s door.

It bore the following legend: 

CLOSED
BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL RECEIVER

HENRY D. FELDMAN
Attorney for Petitioning Creditors

Abe stopped short and shook the sticky hand of the bill-poster.

“How d’ye do, Mr. Feinstein?” he said.

“Ah, good morning, Mr. Potash,” Feinstein cried in his employer’s best tone and manner.

“What’s the matter?  Is Rifkin in trouble?”

“Oh, no,” Feinstein replied ironically.  “Rifkin ain’t in trouble; his creditors is in trouble, Mr. Potash.  The Federal Textile Company, ten thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars; Miller, Field & Simpson, three thousand dollars; the Kosciusko Bank, two thousand and fifty.”

Abe whistled his astonishment.

“I always thought he done it such a fine business,” he commented.

“Sure he done it a fine business,” the law clerk said.  “I should say he did done it a fine business.  If he got away with a cent he got away with fifty thousand dollars.”

“Don’t nobody know where he skipped to?”

“Only his wife,” Feinstein replied, “and she left home yesterday.  Some says she went to Canada and some says to Mexico; but they mostly goes to Brooklyn, and who in blazes could find her there?”

Abe nodded solemnly.

“But come inside and give a look around,” Feinstein said hospitably.  “Maybe there’s something you would like to buy at the receiver’s sale next week.”