and policemen in the city of New York. Wages,
four dollars a day. I'll replace them with dead ones at half the money.

"Oh, prodigious! I never thought of that. F-o-u-r thousand dollars a
day. Now I do begin to see! But will dead policemen answer?"

"Haven't they--up to this time?"

"Well, if you put it that way--"

"Put it any way you want to. Modify it to suit yourself, and my lads
shall still be superior. They won't eat, they won't drink--don't need
those things; they won't wink for cash at gambling dens and unlicensed
rum-holes, they won't spark the scullery maids; and moreover the bands of
toughs that ambuscade them on lonely beats, and cowardly shoot and knife
them will only damage the uniforms and not live long enough to get more
than a momentary satisfaction out of that."

"Why, Colonel, if you can furnish policemen, then of course--"

"Certainly--I can furnish any line of goods that's wanted. Take the
army, for instance--now twenty-five thousand men; expense, twenty-two
millions a year. I will dig up the Romans, I will resurrect the Greeks,
I will furnish the government, for ten millions a year, ten thousand
veterans drawn from the victorious legions of all the ages--soldiers that
will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses, and cost
never a cent for rations or repairs. The armies of Europe cost two
billions a year now--I will replace them all for a billion. I will dig
up the trained statesmen of all ages and all climes, and furnish this
country with a Congress that knows enough to come in out of the rain--
a thing that's never happened yet, since the Declaration of Independence,
and never will happen till these practically dead people are replaced
with the genuine article. I will restock the thrones of Europe with the
best brains and the best morals that all the royal sepulchres of all the
centuries can furnish--which isn't promising very much--and I'll divide
the wages and the civil list, fair and square, merely taking my half
and--"

"Colonel, if the half of this is true, there's millions in it--millions."

"Billions in it--billions; that's what you mean. Why, look here; the
thing is so close at hand, so imminent, so absolutely immediate, that if
a man were to come to me now and say, Colonel, I am a little short, and
if you could lend me a couple of billion dollars for--come in!"

This in answer to a knock. An energetic looking man bustled in with a
big pocket-book