by owners ashore and sassed on the high seas by fellows like that
one who just slammed past us! If that passenger-steamer had hit me the
lawyers would have shoved the tar end of the stick into my hands! It's
all for the good of the hellbent fellows the way things are arranged
in this world at the present time. I'll be lucky if he doesn't lodge
complaint against me when he gets to New York, saying that I got in his
way!" He cut off a fresh sliver of black plug and took his position at
the whistle-pull. "You'd better go get an heiress," he advised his mate,
sourly. "Being an old-fashioned skipper in these days of steam-boating
is what I'm too polite to name. And as to being the other kind--well,
you have just seen him whang past!"

However, as they went wallowing up the coast, their old tub sagging with
the weight of the rails under her hatches, Mate Mayo felt considerable
of a young man's ambitious envy of that spick-and-span swaggerer who
had yelled anathema from the pilot-house of the _Triton_. It was
real steamboating, he reflected, even if the demands of owners and
dividend-seekers did compel a master to take his luck between his teeth
and gallop down the seas.

XVI ~ MILLIONS AND A MITE

To Tiffany's I took her,
I did not mind expense;
I bought her two gold ear-rings,
They cost me fifty cents.
And a-a-away, you santee!
My dear Annie!
O you New York girls!
Can't you dance the polka!
--Shanty, "The Lime Juicer."

Mr. Ralph Bradish, using one of the booth telephones in the Wall Street
offices of Marston & Waller, earnestly asked the cashier of an up-town
restaurant, as a special favor, to hold for twenty-four hours the
personal check, amount twenty-five dollars, given by Mr. Bradish the
evening before.

Ten minutes later, with the utmost nonchalance and quite certain that
the document was as good as wheat, Mr. Bradish signed a check for one
million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

That amount in no measure astonished him. He was quite used to signing
smashing-big checks when he was called into the presence of Julius
Marston. Once, the amount named was two millions. And there had
been numbers and numbers of what Mr. Bradish mentally termed "piker
checks"--a hundred thousand, two and three hundred thousand. And he had
never been obliged to request any hold up on those checks for want of
funds. Because, in each instance, there had been a