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.
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 magic, printed line along which Mr. Bradish had splashed his signature.
Before he blotted the ink on this check Bradish glanced, with only idle curiosity, to note in what capacity he was serving this time. The printed line announced to him that he was "Treasurer, the Paramount Coast Transportation Company, Inc." He remembered that in the past he had signed as treasurer of the "Union Securities Company," the "Amalgamated Holding Company," and for other corporations sponsoring railroads and big industries with whose destinies Julius Marston, financier, appeared to have much to do. It was evident that Financier Marston preferred to have a forty-dollar-a-week clerk do the menial work of check-signing, or at least to have that clerk's name in evidence instead of Marston's own.