lock 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,