ays get plenty
of 'em. What's the matter he ain't satisfied?"

"Nothing's the matter," Morris said. "He is simply going into the pants
business. His brother-in-law is got a small place downtown and he is
going as partners together with him. They ought to make a success of it
too, Abe, if nerve would got anything to do with it. The feller actually
wants me I should give him an introduction to Feder of the Kosciusko
Bank."

"Sure; why not?" Abe commented.

"Why not?" Morris repeated. "What would Feder think of us if we are
bringing a yokel like Shapolnik into his office? The feller ain't been
two years in the country yet."

"Don't knock a feller like Shapolnik just because he ain't putting on no
front nor throwing no bluffs, Mawruss," Abe retorted. "It's the faker
with the four-carat diamond pin which is doing his creditors, Mawruss,
but the yokel with the soup on his coat pays a hundred cents on the
dollar every time."

Half an hour later Abe conducted his retiring skirt-cutter to the Fifth
Avenue branch of the Kosciusko Bank, and as they approached the corner
of Nineteenth Street on their return they encountered Max Koblin, the
Raincoat King. He was about to enter the tonneau of an automobile, while
Sidney Koblin, the Heir Apparent, sat at the tiller arrayed in a silk
duster and goggles. Max grinned maliciously as he noted Abe's shabby,
bearded companion.

"Always entertaining the out-of-town trade, Abe?" he said.

Abe relaxed his features in what he intended for a smile, but afterward
he turned to Shapolnik with a scowl.

"Only one thing I got to tell you, Shapolnik," he declared. "Nowadays,
if a feller wants to make a success he must got to wear good clothes and
look like a _mensch_, y'understand? It never harms in business,
Shapolnik, that a feller should throw sometimes, oncet in a while, a
little bluff."

* * * * *

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty Sidney Koblin had so often tested
the maxim, "Boys will be boys," that Max Koblin's patience at length
became exhausted. "Do you mean to told me you ain't got one cent left
from that forty I gave you on Saturday?" Max asked on the Monday
morning following Shapolnik's resignation.

"Aw, what's biting you?" Sidney cried. "You sat behind me last night and
if it wouldn't been for you I wouldn't of played that last four-hundred
hand at all. Cost forty-eight dollars, that advice of yours."

This was a facer, to be sure, and