Old Jack gets up, peels me off the roll and hands me to her with a bow.
“Madam,” says he, just like actors I’ve heard, “here is a tainted bill. I am a gambler. This bill came to me to-night from a gentleman’s son. Where he got it I do not know. If you will do me the favor to accept it, it is yours.”
The woman took me with a trembling hand.
“Sir,” said she, “I counted thousands of this issue of bills into packages when they were virgin from the presses. I was a clerk in the Treasury Department. There was an official to whom I owed my position. You say they are tainted now. If you only knew—but I won’t say any more. Thank you with all my heart, sir—thank you—thank you.”
Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run? To a bakery. Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery. And I get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with a dozen rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine water-wheel. Of course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed up in the bakery, wondering whether I’d get changed at the drug store the next day in an alum deal or paid over to the cement works.
A week afterward I butted up against one of the one-dollar bills the baker had given the woman for change.
[247]
