want to talk to you at all, Kleiman," he replied; "and, anyhow,
Kleiman, I don't know what you mean--we are trying to do you! The shoe
pinches on the other foot, Kleiman, when you just stop to consider you
are stealing away from us that feller Harkavy, which all he knows we
taught him."

Louis Kleiman emitted a short, raucous guffaw.

"Well, what are you kicking about?" he said. "You stole him back
again--ain't it?"

"Stole him back again!" Morris repeated. "What are you talking nonsense,
Kleiman? We wouldn't take that feller back in our store, not if we could
get him to come to work for two dollars a week."

"Yow!" Kleiman exclaimed skeptically. "I don't suppose you know the
feller left us at all?"

"I did not," Morris replied promptly; "and if he did, Kleiman, I
couldn't blame him. A feller doesn't want to work all his life for ten
dollars a week."

"What d'ye mean, ten dollars a week? We paid Harkavy fifteen and we
offered him twenty-five; but the feller wouldn't stay with us at all.
For two weeks now he acts uneasy and yesterday he leaves us."

"That's all right, Kleiman," Morris said as the train drew into
Ninety-sixth Street. "You could easy steal somebody else from another
concern." Kleiman glared at Morris and was about to utter a particularly
incisive retort when the train stopped.

"I got to change here," he announced; "but when I see you again,
Perlmutter, I would tell you what you are."

"I don't got to tell you what you are, Kleiman," Morris concluded as he
opened his evening paper. "You know only too well."

"_Rosher!_" Kleiman hissed as he hurled himself into the mob of
passengers that blocked the exit.

Morris nodded sardonically and commenced to read his paper. He desisted
immediately, however, when his eye fell upon a cut accompanying Felix
Geigermann's display advertisement. It was a beaded marquisette costume,
made in obvious imitation of one of Potash & Perlmutter's leaders; and
the retail price quoted by Geigermann was precisely one dollar less than
Potash & Perlmutter's lowest wholesale figure.

"That's some of Harkavy's work," Morris muttered; and for the remainder
of the journey he was once more plunged in the gloomiest cogitation.
Almost automatically he alighted at the Brooklyn Bridge and boarded a
Madison Street Car; and it was not until the jolting, old-fashioned
vehicle had nearly reached its eastern terminus that he discerned the
house number furnished to him by Steuermann.