"You said I should sign the paper," Caspar reminded him, accusingly.
"You're all right so long as you don't give him a cent unless I say so."
"I won't; not even if you say so."
With thirty cents of food and thirty millions of confidence under his waistcoat, Hendrik Rutgers walked from the Colossal Restaurant down the Bowery and Center Street to the City Hall. At the door of the Mayor's room he fixed the doorkeeper with his stern eye and requested his Honor to be informed that the secretary of the National Street Advertising Men's Association would like to see his Honor about the annual dinner of the association, of which his Honor had been duly informed.
One of the Mayor's secretaries came out, a tall young man who, as a reporter on a sensational newspaper, had acquired a habit of dodging curses and kicks. Now, as Mayor's secretary, he didn't quite know how to dodge soft soap and glad hands.
"Good afternoon," said Hendrik, with what might be called a business-like amiability. "Will the Mayor accept?"
"The Mayor," said the secretary with an amazing mixture of condescension and uneasiness, as of a man calling on a poor friend in whose parlor there is shabby furniture but in whose cellar there is a ton of dynamite—"the Mayor knows nothing about your asso—of the dinner of your association." The secretary looked pleased at having caught himself in time.
"Why, I wrote," began H. Rutgers, with annoyance, "over a week—" He silenced himself while he opened his frock-coat, tilted back his high hat from a corrugated brow, and felt in his pocket. It is the delivery, not the speech, that distinguishes the great artist. Otherwise writers would be considered intelligent people.
"Hell!" exclaimed Hendrik, looking at the secretary so fixedly and angrily that the ex-reporter flinched. "It's in the other coat. I mean the copy of the letter I sent the Mayor exactly a week ago to-day. I wondered why he hadn't answered."
"He never got it," the secretary hastened to say.