To Tiffany's I took her,
I did not mind expense;
I bought her two gold ear-rings,
They cost me fifty cents.
And a-a-away, you santee!
My dear Annie!
O you New York girls!
Can't you dance the polka!
--Shanty, "The Lime Juicer."
Mr. Ralph Bradish, using one of the booth telephones in the Wall Street
offices of Marston & Waller, earnestly asked the cashier of an up-town
restaurant, as a special favor, to hold for twenty-four hours the
personal check, amount twenty-five dollars, given by Mr. Bradish the
evening before.
Ten minutes later, with the utmost nonchalance and quite certain that
the document was as good as wheat, Mr. Bradish signed a check for one
million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
That amount in no measure astonished him. He was quite used to signing
smashing-big checks when he was called into the presence of Julius
Marston. Once, the amount named was two millions. And there had
been numbers and numbers of what Mr. Bradish mentally termed "piker
checks"--a hundred thousand, two and three hundred thousand. And he had
never been obliged to request any hold up on those checks for want of
funds. Because, in each instance, there had been a magic, printed line
along which Mr. Bradish had splashed his signature.
Before he blotted the ink on this check Bradish glanced, with only
idle curiosity, to note in what capacity he was serving this time. The
printed line announced to him that he was "Treasurer, the Paramount
Coast Transportation Company, Inc." He remembered that in the past
he had signed as treasurer of the "Union Securities Company," the
"Amalgamated Holding Company," and for other corporations sponsoring
railroads and big industries with whose destinies Julius Marston,
financier, appeared to have much to do. It was evident that Financier
Marston preferred to have a forty-dollar-a-week clerk do the menial
work of check-signing, or at least to have that clerk's name in evidence
instead of Marston's own.
That modesty about having his name appear in public on a check seemed to
attach to the business habits of Mr. Marston.
Mighty few person were ever admitted to this inner sanctuary where
Bradish sat facing his employer across the flat-topped desk. And men who
saw that employer outside his office did not turn their heads to stare
after him or point respectful finger at him or remark to somebody else,
"There's the big Julius Marston." In the first place, Mr. Marston was
not big in a physical sense, and there was nothing about him which would
attract attention or cause him to be remarked in a crowd. And only a few
persons really knew him, anyway.