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actual and cognizant to the senses of touch, sight, taste or smell to transfer to the victim for the money so my conscience might rest easy. After that I felt better and entered more cheerfully into the foul play. Andy, says I, as we strayed through the smoke along the cinderpath they call Smithfield Street, had you figured out how we are going to get acquainted with these coke kings and pig-iron squeezers? Not that I would decry my own worth or system of drawing-room deportment, and work with the olive fork and pie knife, says I, but isnt the entree nous into the salons of the stogie smokers going to be harder than you imagined? If theres any handicap at all, says Andy, its our own refinement and inherent culture. Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain, whole-hearted, unassuming, democratic men. They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of em rose from obscurity, says Andy, and theyll live in it till the town gets to using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and dont go too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty on steel rails we wont have any trouble in meeting some of em socially. Well, Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our bearings. We got to knowing several millionaires by sight. One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it hed turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he used to be a glass-blower before he made his money. One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About eleven oclock he came into my room. Landed one, Jeff, says he. Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills, real estate and natural gas. Hes a fine man; no airs about him. Made all his money in the last five years. Hes got professors posting him up now in educationart and literature and haberdashery and such things. When I saw him hed just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that thered be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond Alley and sat on stools and had sparkling Moselle and clam powder and apple fritters. Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty Street. Hes got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it. Hes got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another. His names Scudder, and hes 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells. All right, says I. Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil? Now, that man, says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, aint what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through hell make J. P. Morgans collection of sweetshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrichs craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern. |
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