'Oh, don't get crackly just because you're a Buffalo bill,' says the fiver. 'You'd be limp, too, if you'd been stuffed down in a thick cotton-and-lisle-thread under an elastic all day, and the thermometer not a degree under 85 in the store.'
'I never heard of a pocketbook like that,' says I. 'Who carried you?'
'A shopgirl,' says the five-spot.
'What's that?' I had to ask.
'You'll never know till their millennium comes,' says the fiver.
Just then a two-dollar bill behind me with a George Washington head, spoke up to the fiver:
'Aw, cut out yer kicks. Ain't lisle thread good enough for yer? If you was under all cotton like I've been to- day, and choked up with factory dust till the lady with the cornucopia on me sneezed half a dozen times, you'd have some reason to complain.'
That was the next day after I arrived in New York. I came in a $500 package of tens to a Brooklyn bank from one of its Pennsylvania correspondents--and I haven't made the acquaintance of any of the five and two spot's friends' pocketbooks yet. Silk for mine, every time.
I was lucky money. I kept on the move. Sometimes I changed hands twenty times a day. I saw the inside of every business; I fought for my owner's every pleasure. It seemed that on Saturday nights I never missed being slapped down on a bar. Tens were always slapped down, while ones and twos were slid over to the bartenders folded. I got in the habit of looking for mine, and I managed to soak in a little straight or some spilled Martini or Manhattan whenever I could. Once I got tied up in a great greasy roll of bills in a pushcart peddler's jeans. I thought I never would get in circulation again, for the future department store owner lived on eight cents' worth of dog meat and onions a day. But this peddler got into trouble one day on account of having his cart too near a crossing, and I was rescued. I always will feel grateful to the cop that got me. He changed me at a cigar store near the Bowery that was running a crap game in the back room. So it was the Captain of the precinct, after all, that did me the best turn, when he got his. He blew me for wine the next evening in a Broadway restaurant; and I really felt as glad to get back again as an Astor does when he sees the lights of Charing Cross.
A tainted ten certainly does get action on Broadway. I was alimony once, and got folded in a little dogskin purse among a lot of dimes. They were bragging about the busy times there were in Ossining whenever three girls got hold of one of them during the ice cream season. But it's Slow Moving Vehicles Keep to the Right for the little Bok tips when you think of the way we bison plasters refuse to stick to anything during the rush lobster hour.
The first I ever heard of tainted money was one night when a good thing with a Van to his name threw me over with some other bills to buy a stack of blues.
About midnight a big, easy-going man with a fat face like a monk's and the eye of a janitor with his wages raised tooks me and a lot of other notes and rolled us into what is termed a 'wad' among the money tainters.
'Ticket me for five hundred,' said he to the banker, 'and look out for everything, Charlie. I'm going out for a stroll in the glen before the moonlight fades from the brow of the cliff. If anybody finds the roof in their way there's $60,000 wrapped in a comic supplement in the upper left-hand corner of the safe. Be bold; everywhere be bold, but be not bowled over. 'Night.'
I found myself between two $20 gold certificates. One of 'em says to me:
'Well, old shorthorn, you're in luck to-night. You'll see something of life. Old Jack's going to make the Tenderloin look like a hamburg steak.'
'Explain,' says I. 'I'm used to joints, but I don't care for filet mignon with the kind of sauce you serve.'
'`Xcuse me,' said the twenty. 'Old Jack is the proprietor of this gambling house. He's going on a whiz to- night because he offered $50,000 to a church and it refused to accept it because they said his money was tainted.'
'What is a church?' I asked.
'Oh, I forgot,' says the twenty, 'that I was talking to a tenner. Of course you don't know. You're too much to put into the contribution basket, and not enough to buy anything at a bazaar. A church is--a large building in which penwipers and tidies are sold at $20 each.'
I don't care much about chinning with gold certificates. There's a streak of yellow in 'em. All is not gold that's quitters.
Old Jack certainly was a gild-edged sport. When it came his time to loosen up he never referred the waiter to an actuary.
By and by it got around that be was smiting the rock in the wilderness; and all along Broadway things With cold noses and hot gullets fell in on our trail. The third Jungle Book was there waiting for somebody to put covers on it. Old Jack's money may have had a taint to it, but all the same he had orders for his Camembert piling up on him every minute. First his friends rallied round him; and then the fellows that his friends knew by sight; and then a few of his enemies buried the hatchet; and finally he was buying souvenirs for so many Neapolitan fisher maidens and butterfly octettes that the head waiters were 'phoning all over town for Julian Mitchell to please come around and get them into some kind of order.
At last we floated into an uptown cafe that I knew by heart. When the hod-carriers' union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal kicker called out: 'Six--eleven--forty-two--nineteen-- twelve' to his men, and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port Arthur or Portsmouth. But old Jack wasn't working for the furniture and glass factories that night. He sat down quiet and sang 'Ramble' in a half-hearted way. His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me, because his offer to the church had been refused. But the wassail went on; and Brady himself couldn't have hammered the thirst mob into a better imitation of the real penchant for the stuff that you screw out of a bottle with a napkin.
Old Jack paid the twenty above me for a round, leaving me on the outside of his roll. He laid the roll on the table and sent for the proprietor.
'Mike,' says he, 'here's money that the good people have refused. Will it buy of your wares in the name of the devil? They say it's tainted.'
'I will,' says Mike, 'and I'll put it in the drawer next to the bills that was paid to the parson's daughter for kisses at the church fair to build a new parsonage for the parson's daughter to live in.'
