l_ the goods, delivered," she says.

"What's this leading up to?" I asked.

"To the way that man Schultz cheats you!" says Ma. "He didn't send the
Old Home Rye!"

Believe you me, never have I been handed a meaner deal than that, no,
not even the night Goldringer first heard of me and came to see my
try-out for the big time and my pink tights didn't come.

"Ma!" says I. "Why don't you call him up and find out why didn't he?"

"I've done that!" she says. "And he claims on his oath it was sent with
the rest. I spoke to the boy which brought it and then to Schultz
himself. They both claim they give it to Rudie."

Rudie was the janitor but he had missed his profession. He had ought to
of been a sleight-of-hand man, for he could make things disappear in a
way which would of delighted a morning matinee audience, especially
those under twelve years of age. Believe you me, though, he was never
known to make anything grow where nothing had been before--not rabbits
or even silk handkerchiefs, but it's the truth that he had onct or twice
caused a vanished quart of cream to reappear if given a sufficiently
hard call quick enough after it was missed. And the minute I heard he
was cast for a part in my tragedy, I decided to hear him read his lines
right off without no delay, because it was practically impossible that
he could of got away with more than a quart yet and I was prepared to go
through the business of believing him when he come to the description of
how he had dropped it by accident and too bad but it broke.

Which was all right in theory, but Rudie did nothing of the kind.
Evidently so long as he was lying he had made up his mind it was as
well to be killed for a case as a quart, as the poet says, and when I
sent for him and he had kept me waiting while he sifted the ashes and
pounded on the steam pipes and talked to the garbage man and got a light
from the cop and chatted with the elevator-girl and a few little odds
and ends like that just to show me where I got off, he finally decided
to come up. Well, it was seven months to Xmas, so what could I expect?
Anyways, he finally made his entrance, down R. C. to footlights, in my
Louis-size drawing-room, leaving tracks behind him which Ma spotted with
a angry eye as fast as he laid them, and with all the well-known
courtesy of the proletariat he looked me in the eye.

"Well?" he says.

"Say, Trotsky!" I says, for I had never liked this bird, as he was on
one continue