“It’s all right, Mawruss,” he said.  “I rung up the Kosciusko Bank and the two-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar check went through all right.”

“Sure it did,” Morris replied, his drooping spirits once more revived.  “I deposited it at eleven o’clock yesterday morning.  I don’t take no chances on getting stuck, Abe, and I only hope you didn’t get stuck on them foulards, neither.”

Abe grinned broadly.

“You needn’t worry about that, Mawruss,” he replied.  “Stocks from stock exchanges maybe I don’t know it, Mawruss; but stocks from silk foulards I do know it, Mawruss, and don’t you forget it.”

CHAPTER IX

“Sol Klinger must think he ain’t taking chances enough in these here stocks, Mawruss,” Abe Potash remarked a week after the slump in Interstate Copper.  “He got to hire a drummer by the name Walsh yet.  That feller’s idee of entertaining a customer is to go into Wasserbauer’s and to drink all the schnapps in stock.  I bet yer when Walsh gets through, he don’t know which is the customer and which is the bartender already.”

“You got to treat a customer right, Abe,” Morris commented, “because nowadays we are up against some stiff competition.  You take this here new concern, Abe, the Small Drygoods Company of Walla Walla, Washington, Abe, and Klinger & Klein ain’t lost no time.  Sol tells me this morning that them Small people start in with a hundred thousand capital all paid in.  Sol says also their buyer James Burke which they send it East comes from the same place in the old country as this here Frank Walsh, and I guess we got to hustle if we want to get his trade, ain’t it?”

“Because a customer is a Landsmann of mine, Mawruss,” Abe replied, “ain’t no reason why I shall sell him goods, Mawruss.  If I could sell all my Landsleute what is in the cloak and suit business, Mawruss, we would be doing a million-dollar business a month, ain’t it?”

At this juncture Morris drew on his imagination.  “I hear it also, Abe,” he hinted darkly, “that this here James Bourke, what the Small Drygoods Company sends East, is related by marriage to this here Walsh’s wife.”

“Wives’ relations is nix, Mawruss,” Abe replied.  “I got enough with wives’ relations.  When me and my Rosie gets married her mother was old man Smolinski’s a widow.  He made an honest failure of it in the customer peddler business in eighteen eighty-five, and the lodge money was pretty near gone when I got into the family.  Then my wife’s mother gives my wife’s brother, Scheuer Smolinski, ten dollars to go out and buy some schnapps for the wedding, and that’s the last we see of him, Mawruss.  But Rosie and me gets married, anyhow, and takes the old lady to live with us, and the first thing you know, Mawruss, she gets sick on us and dies, with a professor and two trained nurses at my expense, and that’s the way it goes, Mawruss.”